Monthly Archives: January 2023

The World Building Has Started

 

After the holiday break — which wasn’t a real break as there was a lot of overtime at the day job — I have begun the rough ideas on paper stage for my next novel.

While I have an idea for the characters and the central plot and story there are a lot of details yet to work out. For me that starts with the world building.

I know some of the outlines of the world that this story has to take place in. The plot dictates elements of the worlds. You can never have Alien happen in a world of happy socialism, so to get to Alien you must have a world with greedy corporations.

Given that the working title for the next novel is Company Town: Mars that means the world building has to include a lot of capitalism and all that entails. It’s set about 120 years in the future and will be mostly a sociological science-fiction tale about the system to hem, corral, and define our actions.

What is fun in this phase is discovering the new aspect of the universe as they appear in my little noggin. The very act of making the notes open new idea and expands into constructions I hadn’t considered before putting words to documents.

I am thinking that this book will take place in a world where divergent political pressures have shattered the United States and the grand Union has failed. While I expect none of the story will actually take place on Earth much less in the United States the background is essential to creating the fictional present.

I don’t know how others feel about the world building but for me it is one of the more fun aspects of writing.

Share

A Study of the Toxic Fanboy: Tyler in The Menu

Searchlight Pictures

 

 

 

The following essay includes plot details including the major twist in Mark Mylod’s feature film The Menu.

 

The Menu has been principally viewed as a class focused social satire with strong elements of horror. Even the characters, such as Chef Slowik (Ralph Fiennes) refer to each other by class distinction, ‘Givers’ and ‘Takers.’ Slowik bemoans the fact that his artistry has reached a price point where the only people with the means to experience it are constitutionally incapable of enjoying it as they are never satisfied. The ultra-wealthy consume mindlessly, the act of consumption becoming merely a peacocking display utterly devoid of enjoyment, meaning, or even memorable. One set of characters are revealed to have spent nearly 28,000 dollars experiencing Chef’s artistry and yet fail to recall a single clear instance of it.

Beyond the social economic class divide between the service industry artists of Chef, his staff, and wealth patrons The Menu also holds sharp biting commentary of the Uber-Fan, represented by Tyle (Nicholas Hoult.)

While Tyler is in fact a member of the wealth class, he mentions the price of the exclusive dinner, $1250 per person, without even the slightest hesitation or hint of trouble at this extravagance. It is also clear that Tyler is well off since he can hire an expensive escort for an evening date. That said Tyler is not here because he is wealthy, ruined Chef’s day off with a pitiful performance, or has failed to appreciate the artistry, but rather he is precisely for because his slavish adoration of Chef and his ‘experience’ is an example of the taxic fan that disgraces the art for both the artist and consumer.

Tyler, like a devoted franchise fa who can quote every obscure fact of legendary lore, has buried himself in the minutia of technique but without any understanding or comprehension of art’s meaning. While horrors unfold around him, dismemberment and suicide, Tyler is lost in the taste and texture of the menu’s courses.

Desperate for validation and as a vainglorious showboat Tyler takes every opportunity to demonstrate his deep knowledge or culinary tools and techniques while simultaneously snubbing and disparaging his companion for her own tastes and interests. He berates ‘Margot’ (Anya Taylor-Joy) for ruining her palate with cigarette smoke and demeans her intelligence when it comes to Chef’s final thematic point. “You won’t figure it out until the end.”

Later it is revealed that not only it was Chef’s intent that the culmination of the evening was that everyone was doomed to die but that Tyler was already fully aware of this. Tyler, utterly obsessed with experiencing Chef Slowik’s extraordinary talents, is willing to die for a single evening meal at the exclusive restaurant. Even more horrifying Tyler engaged a professional escort, ‘Margot’, when his original date broke up with him. Tyler held everyone else in contempt, holding himself above and apart from the rabble due to his deep knowledge and understanding to the culinary arts.

However, he was blind to Chef’s disdain for him. Tyler’s obsession is not the honor that Chef wants for his skill. Slowik hates Tyler for his pathetic, fawning, idolization and it was not enough for Chef that Tyler die along with himself, the staff, and the other diners, but Tyler’s humiliation was required.

Turning into the film third act, Chef Slowik pulls Tyler from his seat and, after dressing him as a chef, brings him into the kitchen to display his own culinary talents.

Of which Tyler has none.

Like so many dedicate, noisy, bossy, and opinionated fanboys Tyler when faced with creating a work in the art he knows so well fails miserably producing the supplemental course labeled Tyler’s Bullshit. For all his posturing, pronouncements, and peacocking Tyler is revealed an empty vessel with nothing of his own to contribute.

Chef words, unheard by the audience, destroys what little remained of Tyler and prompting Tyler’s suicide.  The obsessive fan, and it is wise to remember that the word ‘fan’ is derived from ‘fanatic,’ corrupt the art that they profess to love. They have replaced understanding with minutia, promoting with gatekeeping, and empathy with arrogance.

Real art and real appreciation require humility as well talent and understanding.

Share

An Intriguing Start: The Rig

 

January 6th Amazon Prime dropped the first season of its new supernatural thrilled program The Rig on its service. (Not to be confused with the 2010 American Horror movie.)

Starring Iain Glen (Whom many will recognize from Game of Thrones) as Offshore Installation Manager Magnus MacMillan, the program is set aboard the deep-sea drilling platform Kinloch Amazon StudiosBravo as the crew is about to rotate off after a long hard period of working the rig. However, tensions among between among crew between each other and between a representative of the Corporation, Rose Mason (Emily Hampshire) are pushed beyond the breaking point when a series of unexpected and inexpiable events isolates the platform, trapping everyone aboard.

With a large cast The Rig presents the complex, dynamic, and potentially explosive setting of overworked and scared people isolated from all help as they confront dangers without precedent.

Amazon Prime presented The Rig in the ‘binge model’ of distribution, making all six episodes of the premier season available on release. However, neither I nor my sweetie-wife enjoy the full-on a binge and as such we have watched only the first episode. Given that I can properly review an incomplete story I will recount my impression of its opening.

Among the characters populating the series is Fulmer Hamilton (Martin Compston) whose romantic relationship with Rose creates friction and fears of favoritism among the rig workers, Lars Hutton (Owen Teale) a fierce and suspicious rig worker whose distrust of the management and corporation is not utterly unfounded, and Alwyn Evans (Mark Bonnar) the human resources officer caught in the middle of the disintegrating morale.

Filmed entirely in studios in Scotland the series boasts a UK cast with the accompanying array for accents. The digital effects recreating the open seas and the exterior of the platform are most serviceable with only a few shots that have an uncanny unreal valley to them, but they are not enough to shatter the illusion.

I am intrigued enough to continue watching and have hopes that the season will be worth the watch.

Share

Glass Onion’s Ending

 

 

Clearly as I am speaking about the final resolution to the satirical second outing of Detective

Netflix

Benoit Blanc, the center piece of this post is built entirely on a crucial and major spoiler for the film. Proceed if you have seen the movie or simply do not care about knowing the ending.

 

 

SPOILERS FROM HERE ON OUT

After Detective Blanc revealed that billionaire tech-bro Miles Bron had murdered his former partner, Cassandra Brand, along with a friend bent on blackmailing Bron with that knowledge, but that he lacked direct evidence to convict Bron, Cassandra’s sister Helen’s rampage destroys Bron’s home. The fire destroyed Bron plans, upon which he had wagered his entire company, for a new safe energy system.

Among the artifacts destroyed in the conflagration was the famed painting The Mona Lisa, on loan to Bron by the French government and for whom Bron held an obsessive interest. Expressed in his desire to do something that would be so great, so extraordinary, that it would be remembered in the same breath as Davinci’s famous work. The ironic justice in Helen’s rampage is that by being responsible for the Mona Lisa’s destruction Miles Bron as in fact achieved his obsessive fantasy of forever being linked with the painting.

On the screenwriting podcast Scriptnotes writer/Director Rian Johnson, admitted that there was some trepidation that the audience would rebel at the priceless work of art’s destruction. As an insurance policy should the audience find that a bridge too far for their enjoyment, Johnson filmed a never utilized post-credit scene that revealed that painting consumed on in the blaze had been in fact a reproduction and not the original. However, test screenings showed that people accepted his original scripted intentions and the cannon of the film remained that the original was destroyed.

Had that post-credit sequence been used it would have been a mistake and a terrible disservice to the story.

It is a firm conviction of mine that endings are where all the critical themes and meanings in a story are fully realized. Endings must be earned and that must fulfill not only the narrative and emotional requirements of the story they must mean something.

Famously when Frank Oz adapted the musical play Little Shop of Horrors into a feature film, he found that the audience hated the ending with the protagonist feeding his love to the plant followed by himself. However, Oz’s also edited the number The Meek Shall Inherit where the protagonist, faced with the choice between doing right or self-serving interests, removing that character’s critical decision which justified the character’s death.

Had Johnson used the post-credit scene revealing that the Mona Lisa was in fact safe and sound in Paris then the entire ending would lose all its power. With the original unharmed the most devastating consequence of Bron’s idiocy and arrogance would have been wholly negated. That ending would have lacked justice.

Endings are the most critical element of the story. A flawed ending ruins the destination’s journey. (I am looking at you HBO’s Game of Thrones.) It is why I must be a plotter, outlining my novel before starting them because without knowing the destination how can I ever to earn it?

Share